


American Idiot

by iggyvoid



Category: 21st Century Breakdown - Green Day (Album), American Idiot - Green Day (Album)
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23531785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iggyvoid/pseuds/iggyvoid
Summary: Three maniacs in the city of the damned. Who is to be trusted?
Relationships: St. Jimmy/Whatsername
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	1. American Idiot (Introduction)

Inspired by American Idiot, an album by American punk rock band Green Day.

The entire state of California is in shambles. After the fall of an all-controlling megacorporation, hotspots all over America struggle to get civilization back to normal. What once was Oakland, California is one such hotspot that didn't do so well. Completely devoid of control, it is run amok with turf wars, all so a few crazed rebels can live another day. 

Meanwhile, in a suburb 25 or so miles west, Christian, aka the self-named Jesus of Suburbia, is having trouble. The suburb is normal, except for the fact that it's totally landlocked by an sea of flat concrete. Nobody goes into the suburb, or out, but sometimes there are disappearances.

Well anyway, Jesus of Suburbia is determined to find a new life in the city, but what awaits him?

Nothing good.


	2. Jesus of Suburbia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The beginning.

Chapter One

Jesus of Suburbia

And with that, I walked away.

I didn't feel bad. Not in the slightest. I would never feel bad for something like this, leaving someone who didn't love me and all. 

Good morning. My name is Jesus of Suburbia, and I just broke up with my girlfriend. Hooray!

I'm not sad. Quite the opposite, actually. I feel as if I'm free from a pair of shackles. I did love her- for a while at least- but in the end all she was doing for me was weighing me down. While we were still together, I'd sometimes think "She's the only thing keeping me here. If she were to walk away, so would I." Which ended up being a pretty good point. Now that she's gone, it's up to me to figure out what to do now that she isn't holding me back.

Unfortunately, this also means that I don't really have anywhere to go. I live in the deepest circle of hell. Town name doesn't matter, I don't think half of my neighbors remember it anyway, but for reference, we're in California (because of course we are). For the last few months I had been sleeping at my girlfriend's place. Not because I was so committed to her that I wanted to move in, just because I wanted so badly to avoid having to stay at my mother's dump of a house. But I guess now that's over. While I would do practically anything to avoid having to see my mother, sleeping at her place is better than standing by and letting •••••• keep manipulating me just so I could have a nicer place to sleep. 

I'm not ready to go home yet. Right now, all I want to do is have fun. 

That idea of fun ends up leading me to a house party.

All over this part of town, there's house party after house party after house party. Kids who can't get jobs and don't have anything better to do with themselves often end up either dead in a ditch or doing drugs in a stranger's basement (or both, depending on the turns one might take). No matter where you go in town, there's always some wild party raging in a house with bashed-in windows that hasn't been fit for hospitality since 2011. That's what a lot of the places around here are like. 

I was never a big fan of house parties. To me they were never anything more than something to do- something to occupy the time, fill the void. But as we got older and the parties got wilder, I found myself disinterested in the hard drugs that got passed around in those kind of joints. I never pushed it past cigarettes and alcohol and weed. 

That being said, here I am. Attending one of the aforementioned parties simply out of boredom.

The flashing blue and green lights are about the most color you can find in all of town. I let the grey smoke seep out from between my lips as it disappears into the musty air of some random guy's house. I feel myself sink into the lumpy couch in this creaky basement, like I'm wasting away. All of a sudden, I feel a presence looming over me.

"Hey there, Jesus of Suburbia." 

Oh fucking Christ. I recognize that voice.

I turn around to face the source of the voice and, unfortunately, it's exactly who I thought it was. Today, I am met with a face I had hoped I would never have to lay my own two eyes on again. 

"Been a while, eh?"

"Fuck off, Lydia." I scoff, placing my cigarette back in my mouth and turning away so she doesn't get the privilege of being looked at. To combat this, she swings around right back in my gaze, refusing to have the spotlight away from her for even a moment.

"That's a bit of a mean way to greet an old friend," she hisses, making a pouty face and causing my blood to boil. 

Lydia is a short, pale, skinny girl with a round face, bright red hair that curls up and out at the ends, and perfect straight teeth like a military cemetery, wearing the usual tightly bound corset top with a holographic miniskirt, knee-high boots and black lipstick. She has a sort of sickly-sweet, saccharine tone of voice, but speaks like she's talking around bared fangs. She talks sweet but I know her too well and I see right through it. She's not sweet at all. She's a demon. 

Lydia and I were never on good terms. Not even when we were kids. But since we all had to grow up sometime, and we were both stuck in the same dead-end town with all the same people we skipped school with, playground taunts were quick to become hissing and spitting and screaming matches in parking lots. There was never exactly a time when we liked each other in any form, but we... tolerated each other. A lot. 

In contrast, looking at her now, I only feel hatred.

"You haven't been to one of these joints in a while, have you Jesus?" She taunts. "Ever since you linked up with •••••• and all that. I can't imagine you've been doing anything productive, have you?"

That's exactly how she gets you- she asks you a question, you feel like it'd be rude to not answer, she keeps talking, you get roped into a conversation. It only gets worse from there, and trust me, it gets worse.

I groan, blowing the smoke away from my cig in her direction. "Buzz off, Lydia, I'm not going to give you anything," I reply blatantly. 

"Geez, Jesus, no need to be so brash- after all, it was only a question." Lydia says these words as if she's genuinely put off by my response, but her sinister smirk tells me otherwise. She knows I'm in on her game, and somehow that just makes her more gleeful. 

"We aren't friends, Lydia." I respond, but refuse to look her in the eye. "I'm not going to entertain you. I'm not going to play your games. Go away."

Lydia stops talking for a second. For a minute it seems like she might actually stop, but then- she chuckles to herself, before sitting down and placing her hand on my shoulder- tenderly for a moment, then digging into it with her nails. I bite my lip and gulp.

"I'm glad you got out of that relationship, Jesus," she muses into my ear. 

I shudder. "Who told you?" 

"Don't remember exactly." She shrugs. "But the important point being, people know. I know that you're a free bird now. You're free from her grasp! You can do whatever you want!" 

Lydia, who was already uncomfortably close to me to begin with, gets even closer. "But I think I know what you want," she hisses.

She's wrong. I don't want what she thinks I want at all. 

But… given that, I don't really know what I want myself….

I end up going along with it anyway.

Chapter II

City of the Damned 

Lydia’s boyfriend picked her up around 6 the next morning. 

I’ll refrain from the details, but the morning after my encounter with Lydia, the two of us ended up waking up on opposite sides of a seven eleven parking lot, passed out drunk on the cold asphalt. 

I watch them drive away, flicking the dirt and tiny pebbles off of my jacket. Half of my face is numb and red from sleeping on the hard bitumen. I sleepily rub the rheum away from my eyes, still blinking myself awake. 

I guess this means I have to go home.

Winters in this part of Cali aren’t particularly cold. It seldom gets too frigid to comfortably go outside and it pretty much never snows. Despite these conditions, it feels like I turned cold-blooded all of a sudden. 

I start the trek home based on a vague assumption of where I am vs where my mother’s house is. I haven’t actually been in that house in months, but fortunately for me I lived there for nineteen years, so I still have a pretty good idea of where it is and what it looks like. 

On the other end, it’s a bit of a lengthy walk. I think you’ll find we do a lot of walking around here. Mostly because not a whole lot of people can afford a car.

The graffiti in this part of town is weird. Not like, psychedelic weird. Like WEIRD weird. Culty weird. Some of it is completely unintelligible, but a vast majority of it is just random culty sounding bullshit. It’s probably just some kids looking for attention. Whatever it is, I’m fairly certain it’s not an actual cult. I find it extremely unlikely that a cult could sustain itself around here without all of its members getting the shit regularly beat out of them by anarchists. 

In some places graffiti itself is easy to find if you know where to look. Inside a trash can, on the side of a curb, on the underside of a bench, stuff like that. But the closer you get to the center of town, the more obvious and more abundant they get. I think they also get creepier. Cryptic quotes, weird symbols, that kind of shit.

The center of town just so happens to be the seven eleven. Folks around here call it the center of the earth. It's an empty, haunted shell of a convenience store, and it's one of the only fun places around here. 

I can hear you asking, "How could a seven eleven be fun?" Well, beats me. 

The seven eleven is only as fun as the people around it. Sometimes you can get a crowd going and we'll go in and completely trash the place. Other times it's completely desolate. This is one of those times. 

I actually don't know why. By now we're in broad daylight. Usually people are crowding around it because of the heating by now, but somehow there's nobody here. 

I guess this means I've got nowhere to go but home.

As home goes, that place is close enough. The streets aren't home. My girlfriend's place wasn't home, no matter how much I called it that ("When are we going home?" "Remember to be home by midnight"). 

But I'm not too worried about my existential issues concerning "home" as a concept. Right now I'm too busy stressing about how bad it's going to be seeing my mother for the first time in months. 

For context, the last time I saw her was in a bar. We ended up in the same place that night purely by coincidence, my girlfriend and I had gone out for drinks and I guess she had gone to the same place for the same reason. I told her to go home, she had had a few too many. She slapped me in the face, I told her to go fuck herself, my girlfriend had to pull her off of me and we ditched the place. It was a weird night, but she was a weird woman, so it evens out.

Hopefully she didn’t take that to heart. Knowing her, she probably forgot.

My hands dig deep into my pockets. The sun seeps into my eyeballs and I squint to keep it out. I trudge quietly down the still sidewalk. You could hear a pin drop. 

Have I talked about the graffiti in this town enough? I don't know if I've really gotten my point across. It's WEIRD. I'm just trying to walk around and there's all this cryptic art and stuff talking about the fixture in the city of lust, whatever that means. 

Usually the graffiti gets weirder the closer to the center of town you are, but.. for some reason… the closer I get to my mother's home, the more clear they get- yet the more indecipherable they get. I scan the brick walls. The mother of all bombs set to detonate. Longing for the light.   
Scary shit, I think, though I have no idea if it's scary or not, since I don't have the slightest idea what it means. 

My mother's home comes into view. I start mentally preparing myself to face her.  
I turn the corner and walk the footpath up to the broken home, a tiny, one-story suburban house just like every other on the block, with a tiny, dead yard and a cracked cement path. The creaky, stained white porch steps screech under the weight of my boots. 

My chest tight and my stomach tied up tight, I roughly turn the doorknob. It's locked, and since it's been a minute and a half, I don't recall where the spare key is. I let a sigh out, and knock three times, praying that she's home. 

A minute passes. I start getting nervous. 

But then, I hear the knob turn on the other side. 

The door opens. I am met with a wave of familiar scents of beer and piss, and the face of the woman who birthed and raised me. 

"Oh, look who's back."

My mother is a small, stocky woman with fake blonde hair, stained teeth and nothing behind the eyes. She looks like the description of a smoker in an anti cigarette commercial personified. 

She looks older. Not even a full eight months have passed and yet this woman has aged five years at the least. Older, saggier, grayer, more tired. 

She's not happy to see me. Clearly. 

"What dragged you back here? I assumed you were never coming back," she drawled, still standing in the doorway as if purposefully keeping me from going inside. 

"I wasn't," I mutter.

"And yet here you stand?"

I search for words. "I lost the one place I had to stay."

"Ah," she replies- but not in an understanding way. "So now you've dragged ass back to your poor mother as a last resort."

"I would have taken anything else," I defend. "But-"

"You don't have friends," my mother jeers. "I pity you, Jesus of Suburbia."

She turns around and disappears inside, leaving the door stood open for me to follow. I step inside. The scents I was greeted with only grow stronger. I turn a right corner and find my mother sitting- no, lying, practically- in the same spot on her stiff, stained couch where she spent a majority of my childhood, her eyes glued to the television.

"Spike TV?" I ask. 

"Yes," she murmurs. "Don't bother me. Go check out your room. It's gone completely untouched for months." 

"Ok," I reply, though she doesn't hear. I cross the living room into a different hall, then locate my childhood bedroom and push the door open.

My mother is right, it's exactly the same as it ever was, except with an added stench of dust. I place around, taking in the atmosphere. Seeing this cursed place again is enough to make a grown man cry, and not in the good way.

I flop onto my bed. A cloud of dust that had been collecting in a thin layer atop my comforter for months erupts into the air. This is when it dawns on me that I really am in the same situation I was in a year ago. Now that •••••• is gone, no effect has been made on me at all. Nothing has changed. 

Maybe I should have stayed with her. Maybe sacrificing everything I had going just because of the way I felt wasn't the right way to go.

No….. no. I did the right thing. 

Right?

Well, it's not like I can go back on it now. 

This is my home now, whether I like it or not. This is where I'm stuck for the rest of my life, a lonely boy in a lonely house with a lonely mother. And when she's gone, I'll be a lonely man. 

….No.

No no no. This is all wrong. What the fuck am I even saying? 

Jesus fucking Christ. Not even twenty minutes back at my mom's place and I'm already giving up entirely? No. I'm not giving up that easy. 

I lift my spine off of the lumpy mattress. My brain starts forming outlandish ideas.. I'll leave this place forever. Not just this house, not even just this part of town. I'd leave here, and I'd wander until I find a nice place to stay. Find a job there. Find a girl. Live happily, far away from anything I used to know. 

A boy can dream, right?

Anytime I've ever considered finding life somewhere else in the world, I get shut down. No, you idiot, they'd say- there's nowhere to go, you walk out of town it's over for you. I never knew whether they were being truthful or not. This is the only place I've ever known.

I don't care. I don't care at all anymore. If it's over for me, then fuck it, I guess it is. I think I'd rather die out there than live the rest of my life in this hell. 

I'd rather die than spend another minute here. 

I hop off my bed, more energized than ever before. I swing open my closet, tearing out a heavy leather jacket. With it in my grasp, I walk out of my room, the most confident I'd ever been. I don't even stop to think about consequences. I don't stop to think at all. 

"Goodbye, mom," I say plainly. 

"Gone so soon?" She jokes. "Alright, see you in another seven months."

"No you won't," I ensure. "I'm leaving forever."

"Oh? And where are you going?" 

Given that have absolutely no idea where I'm going, I don't really have an accurate response. 

"Home," I reply. 

My mother scoffs. "Home is here, idiot." 

"Nope." I'm too affixed on other issues to effectively argue with my mother.

"Don't 'nope' me." 

I shoot her an "I don't give a fuck" look and make my way towards the door. Before I can escape, my mother gets off the couch (for once) and grasps both my shoulders with her cold, wrinkled hands. She spins me around like a twister flick and glares into my soul like a big predator about to devour a very, very small creature. 

"You stupid fuck," she hisses. "You don't realize just how in the middle of nowhere we are, do you? You walk away, you're doomed."

"Mother, where is the nearest civilized location?" I can see her face tense up. "Besides here, obviously."

"Why should you know?"

I sigh. "Would you rather me end up there or die trying to find it on my own?"

She gulps. "Jingletown," she admits. "If you can even call that hellhole civilized."

"I'm sure it's better than here."

"It's not," she huffs. "And trust me, I know it's bad here. Jingletown is five times worse than the worst edges of California."

"Sounds like paradise." I chuckle. 

"Don't try to get there, Jesus," my mother pleads. 

"Oh, all of a sudden here you are caring so deeply about what I do with my life?" I pull myself away from her. Her hands grasp for me but I shove her away. "Where was that energy seven months ago? Where was that energy my entire life, actually??"

"Don't, Jesus, please. I could give a shit about anything else. Don't cross the concrete. You won't last an hour."

"Sounds like a challenge," I mutter. Her warnings just might be valid, but I don't care. 

"You're an idiot," she murmurs. 

"Insults aren't going to work." 

My mother's face curls into a frustrated frown. She backs up and sits herself back down on the couch. 

"Well?" I ask, though her verdict doesn't actually matter all that much to me. 

"Go if you want. Just don't say I didn't warn you."

"Thank you for your blessing."

And with that, I walked away.

Again.

To wherever "Jingletown" is. 

I walk for a while, somewhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours. The wind is running through my hair as I eventually reach the edge of town and the beginning of nowhere. 

The town ends abruptly. The sidewalk ends here. I've been here before, but it feels different now. All my life all I saw here was sky and scape. Now I see hope. It doesn't end here. There's somewhere out there, somewhere I'm meant to be. 

There's a hard tap on my shoulder. I shudder at the touch, and spin around.

"What are you doing at the end of town, Jesus?" 

"Ah, Lydia," I say, somewhat relieved that it's not a threat but still on edge because… well, it's Lydia. 

"That wasn't an answer." Lydia looks tired. More tired than usual, I mean. She speaks in huffs, as if she just got done sprinting. She's wearing the same clothes she had on last time I saw her (gross), with the edition of a dim green backpack slung lazily over one shoulder. 

"I should ask the same thing about you," I jeer, dodging the question.

"Doesn't matter, I asked you first," she responds. "I certainly hope you're not thinking of leaving."

"For your information, Hermione, I am." 

Lydia rolls her eyes, averting them to the great empty horizon. I look her direction at the straight line separating the white sky from the stony earth, untouched since forever. The sea of hard concrete has always had bad rumors surrounding it but I've never known anyone who tried to get across. There have been people in town who have disappeared, sure, but nobody ever knows to where. 

I'm caught in a trance at the sight. It's far from beautiful, and yet it still takes my breath away. I feel like I'm being suffocated. 

"It really does draw you in," I say under my breath, in case someone else hears. I don't know why I all of a sudden am putting so much trust into Lydia of all people, but, y'know, it's not like I'm ever gonna see these people again.

"You'll die out there, Jesus," she adds somberly. 

"Maybe," I reply. 

We stand in silence for a moment. 

"So are you going to stop me?" I finally speak, looking down at my boots. 

Lydia rolls her eyes, for reasons I don't know. Suddenly, she kneels down and starts rummaging through her backpack. 

I watch her as she digs through it. "Uh.."

"Hold on, shut your stupid mouth for two seconds."

"Rude."

Lydia doesn't respond. She just keeps searching for something in that backpack. 

Suddenly, whatever she was looking for, she finds. She stands up, facing away from me- looking at the items in her hands as if pondering if whatever she's about to do is worth it. Suddenly, she shakes her head, and bends down to put it back in the backpack. I continue to watch awkwardly. 

Lydia turns around, clutching the backpack. She looks into my eyes, an array of emotions swimming in her gaze.

"Well?"

Lydia sighs. "Jesus of Suburbia, you are the single stupidest person I have ever had the displeasure of meeting." 

"Figures," I mumble. 

"That being said, I think you deserve to at least have a chance of survival while engaging in your stupid endeavors," she continues. She holds out the backpack for me to take.

I look up at her, shocked. "For me?" 

"Yes for you, idiot."

I take the bag and immediately unzip it. Lydia continues to talk while I search its containments.

"There's money and rations in there, as well as like, 5 hour energy and some other stuff you'll need to survive in Jingletown. That is where you're headed, right? I can't imagine you'd be going anywhere else."

"Is this a…" I pull out a sleek silver object, holding it up to the light. It's a handgun. 

"God, Jesus, you really don't know what you're getting into, do you?" Lydia rolls her eyes again. "Listen, giving this to you is gonna get me in deep shit, so you better make it last, okay? I mean it, I'm I'm huge trouble because of this."

I'm at a loss for words. "Thank you, Lydia," I sputter. "What did I do to deserve this?"

"Nothing," she replies. "I just pity you, I guess. Seeing you die would be really inconvenient. Especially because I have no idea what could possibly happen to you. Nobody does."

It was true. Nobody really knew what would happen. There were stories, sure.. but most of the true ones were from a long time ago, when things were different. 

"Thank you, Lydia," I say graciously. 

"Don't mention it."

From somewhere back in the city, I can hear a man's voice calling something unintelligible.

"I've gotta run," Lydia says, in a bit of a dismissive tone. "Stay safe, okay?" 

"I will," I lie. I have no idea what's gonna happen in the foreseeable future, but I know that not every decision I make will be very carefully calculated. I can almost taste the danger in my future. 

"Goodbye, you American idiot."

I'm barely done processing these words when she plants a kiss on my cheek. Well, I didn't ask for that. When I turn to look at her, she's nowhere to be seen.

Well. 

Nowhere to go but forward. 

I take a step. From the worn cement to the practically untouched concrete. A shiver shoots up my spine, setting off every little nerve in my system, but it's not painful- just sort of tingly. I figure it's probably just my brain and take another step. The same thing happens. It's weird. 

After a few steps I'm starting to get used to it. Now I'm walking instead of just taking a step per second. 

I don't want to look back- but at the same time I do. Just to watch the place I grew up disappear.

I look back. To my surprise, there are people crowding around where I had started walking away. In seconds, a curious, murmuring gaggle of four or five turns into a crowd of twenty. I turn around, they see the whites of my eyes. There’s a whoop in the crowd, then several others start making excited noises. They’re cheering me on for leaving home, and yet, nobody is taking a step. They raise me up, yet they’re all still fearful. 

In the crowd, I spot Lydia. She’s smiling. Next to her is her boyfriend, who isn’t. I have to imagine he’s at least a little happy to see me go. Good riddance for him, now I’m out of the way, y’know?

The crowd gets quieter as the city grows smaller on the horizon. To them, I’m turning into a speck. Before the city goes fully silent, someone shouts out “Are you leaving home??”. I assume it’s a junkie who has no idea what’s going on. But I guess I owe it to them that it really crashed down on me that, yeah, I’m never coming back. It feels good, like a breath of fresh air, like a swig of fresh drink. I’m ready for whatever’s to come.


End file.
